Iberbanda

» see iberbanda.es as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

The company was incorporated on 3 March 1999 as FirstMark Communications Spain, the local arm of an American operator that was buying up European wireless licenses at the height of the belief that radio would be a cheaper way to reach a house than digging up the street. It became an S.A. in April 2000. FirstMark then left, and on 26 September 2002 the Spanish company took a new name of its own and carried on without its technology partner.

What it had was spectrum. The Ministry of Public Works set the tender terms in October 1999 and resolved it by an Order of 8 March 2000, granting a twenty-year authorization, extendable by ten, to provide radio access service in the 3.4 to 3.6 GHz band. Six such licenses went out in that round. By the time the competition authorities looked at the sector in 2005, half of them had stopped trading and only three were still active. Iberbanda was one.

Its Spanish owners after FirstMark were an odd committee rather than a telecoms company: the newspaper group PRISA and El Corte Ingles' technology arm at just under twenty-six percent each, Carlos Slim's Telmex at 17.83 percent through Sercotel, Omega Capital at 8.8, and then a tail of regional savings banks and the Diario de Burgos holding the rest. License obligations meant building in cities first, but from 2003 the deployments went out into suburban and rural Spain, and that is where the business actually found its shape. It won rural broadband contracts in Catalonia and Andalusia, and in 2005 with Navarra and Castilla y Leon. Its customers were the ones whose villages were a long way down a valley from the nearest exchange.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the regulator said no ~

Telefonica notified the competition service on 10 October 2005 that it intended to take 45 percent of Iberbanda plus an option, which would give it exclusive control. Spain's competition tribunal examined it and advised against: its formal opinion was that authorizing the concentration was not appropriate. The incumbent was proposing to buy one of the few independent operators holding spectrum that could reach homes without using the incumbent's copper.

It happened anyway. Telefonica consolidated Iberbanda from July 2006. The purchase price is not public and should not be guessed at: the tribunal's published report redacts the consideration, the option size, the contract date, the company's revenue and even its site count as confidential, and the figures that circulate online come from forum posts rather than filings.

~ what the spectrum was for ~

Once inside Telefonica the logic of the thing inverted. Iberbanda stopped being a competitor using radio to bypass the incumbent and started being the incumbent's radio department. The regulator's 2015 review of the concession records that Iberbanda had transferred its usage rights to Telefonica de Espana across nine autonomous communities, and that part of the universal service obligation Telefonica was legally required to deliver was being carried on Iberbanda's network. The spectrum bought to compete with Telefonica was now how Telefonica met its own legal minimum.

The license commitments stopped being met in any serious way. The ministry opened a file in July 2009 to convert the concession, and on 29 December 2010 Iberbanda's outstanding obligations were formally suspended at its own request, pending a modification that was still unresolved five years later. Its argument was that the rollout plans it had bid were obsolete because they rested on the market conditions of the day it made the offer, more than fifteen years earlier.

~ the switch-off ~

The ending reached customers as post. On 22 May 2017 a subscriber posted that a letter had just arrived saying the service would close from 26 June. In Avila the residential service stopped on 31 May. Regional press in Zamora covered it on 1 June under a headline about the blackout of an internet provider leaving the rural province in the abyss, reporting that it would stop providing the service across the whole peninsula that month. These were households with no cable and no fiber, which is why they had bought radio in the first place.

Then the paperwork. On 27 July 2017 the sole shareholders of Telefonica de Espana and of Iberbanda agreed a merger by absorption, with the dissolution without liquidation of the absorbed company and the transfer of its entire estate to the absorbing one. The notice ran in the commercial registry bulletin on 11 September 2017, signed by one administrator for each side. That is a real death rather than a rename: the legal person was extinguished, not relabeled.

The website took longer to notice. iberbanda.es was still serving its own page on 3 May 2018, offering WiMAX internet without a telephone line. Twenty-seven days later it answered as a redirect to movistar.es. The domain has since been sold on. It now serves a Spanish news site unconnected to telecoms entirely.

~ wireless, because the copper was not coming ~

Fixed wireless was the broadband of people the map had skipped, and almost every country ran a version of the same experiment in the same years with roughly the same result. Most of the winners discover that mounting radios on masts to serve scattered houses carries its own kind of expense. The ones that survive get bought by the incumbent they were licensed to compete with.

The Turkish version of the argument stayed theoretical for me, because Ankara is a city where the copper went everywhere and the question of what to do without it never came up at my address. What lands hardest in Iberbanda's ending is the sixty or so employees and the letter with a date on it. Somebody opened an envelope in May and learned that the thing on the roof would stop working in five weeks.

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